The legacy blog, which always produced quality niche content, was launched very rapidly with little planning and design thought.

Legacy Blog Design:

With this opportunity, and a team full of ideas, we went through our standard process: identifying the blog’s goals, defining the audience, and documenting everything we felt could improve the blog’s performance.

Here are the key changes resulting from this process:

• Design overhaul to illustrate authority and importance
• Highlight featured posts to focus discussion around hot topics
• Place emphasis on blog contributors to build credibility
• Place more emphasis on comments to facilitate content creation and reader ownership
• Associate an image with each post to stimulate interest
• Simplify post categories associated for streamlined topic navigation
• Improve the blog’s structure for better search engine optimization
• Add social share options (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) to improve reach

New Blog Design:

Only one month after launching the new blog, the number of pageviews had almost doubled, while visitors maintained a strong average time on the site. Even several months after the blog’s launch, traffic has been higher than ever before.

This occurred with no additional promotion, the same content contributors, and the same post frequency — the only change being the new design.  Now the AmericanEHR blog, which was once an undervalued area of the site, is one of the top performing and key selling features of the program, facilitating the community’s growth.

Groupon, the “big daddy” of group buying sites, currently claims they have over 40 million subscribers, and have saved their customers more than $800 million, clearly making them the largest market shareholder among similar sites in the US.

Resting under the big boys, the market is saturated with other, smaller, more niche coupon and group buying sites like AppSumo, GroupGolfer, and even Jewpon.

So where does Facebook Deals fit in? And how will it compete?

Here are a few ways beyond a user base of 500 million:

Social Reach: In comparison to other group buying platforms that utilize email, with Facebook Deals you will be able to “like” a deal, which will share it through your newsfeed, broadcasting the message to your friends. Group buying will be done among pre-established peer groups already online, where a deal or message can spread quickly, and organically. This is the reason so many marketers are already turning toward Facebook’s platform and establishing their brand’s presence through Fan pages.

Virtual Currency: Facebook plans to introduce a new payment system using virtual currency, which means users will be able to pay for Facebook Deals using “credits”. So whether buying a restaurant coupon, vacation package, or series of massage lessons, these credits will reduce the friction involved with online purchases, so users avoid pulling out their wallets every time they see a deal.

User Data: This is a big one, and the reason I’ll probably be signing up.

Facebook already knows its user base. They know your likes and interests. They know your age, sex, and occupation. They may even know your marital status and religion. With the recent addition of Facebook Places, not only could they know what city you live in, but also what neighbourhoods you frequent.

This personal data makes it extremely easy to connect users with advertisers. And Facebook has already proven this method by providing relevant advertising through their hyper-targeted display ad platform, which is expected to take the biggest US display ad market share in 2011.

Drawing from this example, it’s almost a sure thing this data will become a fundamental part to serving relevant, hyper-targeted Deals.

Of course, who knows what will happen in the end, but it could be just a short time before Facebook towers over platforms like Groupon, sliding into the driver’s seat of the group buying bandwagon. And if carrying deals so targeted that a mid-twenties ski bum in Vancouver can grab cheap ski tickets for the local mountains, I’ll be ready to hop on.

Google reports that 20% of all searches are from people looking for local places: plumbers, restaurants, and — for those of us living in the Vancouver suburbs last week — snow tire shops. Over the past couple years, Google AdWords has offered the ability to get closer in with our ads, almost down to neighbourhood levels, to ensure we’re only advertising to people that matter to our businesses. It also provides a local business directory, Google Places. Google really believes in local targeting for its advertisers: rumour is that Google is about to buy local deals site Groupon, and is willing to spend in excess of 2.5 Billion dollars to bring a single-offer, geo-targeted, selling tool to its customers.

Targeting is not new; companies like Environics Analytics have being developing lifestyle-based segmentation models for years to help businesses identify the needs, attitudes and behaviours of customers, and overlay that on geography. Some of this is based on the simple adage “birds of a feather, flock together”, meaning consumers tend to live in micro regions where other consumers behave like them. What is new is how this is being transported into self-serve advertising tools, for example Facebook Advertising.

FB supports demographic filtering, but also behavioural filtering in its advertising. The social networking giant has integrated a tag-like filter that allows advertisers to type keywords that are part of users’ collective profile data. Want to target single men in British Columbia, age 25–34, who love to play the Monopoly board game? There’s 420 of them on Facebook waiting to act on your advertisement!

When you put together your next marketing plan, make sure you consider your local prospects and how you can use the new tools to cost-effectively get your sales message in front of your most receptive audience — and them only.

But it doesn’t have to.

In fact, more and more we’re seeing that with each of these dead ends, there’s almost always a unique opportunity to continue the customer journey.

What if, after your customer requests a quote, they are asked if they would like to join your mailing list? After joining your mailing list, what if they are asked if they would like to register for an upcoming event? And after they register for an event, what if they are presented with an engaging, relevant blog post?

Great websites do an excellent job of getting people to take meaningful actions in areas that may seem like dead ends.

Facebook invites people who’ve logged out to download their mobile application.

After purchasing a product on EBay, you’re asked to review the person who sold it to you.

And on a recent project we did for Slurpee Canada, after you sign up to receive a FREE SLURPEE COUPON, we ask you to join in on the conversation on Facebook.

Take a look at your website user flow, or see where your visitors are dropping out using your web analytics tools, and make a good list of all the potential dead ends. See if there are any opportunities for you to keep them engaged, and continue their journey. How far can you take them?

With that said, I’m not going to leave you with a dead end. How about talking to us about your marketing?

In my last blog post we saw that there were conflicting reports circling the Internet about the results (or supposed lack thereof) for the Old Spice Man campaign. This seemed impossible given the buzz that the campaign was generating, and sure enough time and research revealed that the campaign actually generated a dramatic spike in sales and market share.

What gets me is the fact that so many people, including those who you think would be highly credible sources, got it wrong. Check out this apparent retraction from Time magazine’s article “Old Spice’s Viral Ads Got Attention, Not Sales”:

Update: We might have been a little too specific with the sales stats. Though Red Zone After Hours sales went down, overall body wash sales actually went up 107 percent, according to PRWeek. Good — we hope this means more Mustafa in our lives.

And it’s not as if Time was alone in misreporting the facts either. Many other major publications dropped the ball as well, including MSNBC, Yahoo, Bnet, etc.

Here was Yahoo’s retraction:

Update: A representative for the Old Spice ad campaign clarifies the sales trend and goal of the “Old Spice Man” commercials as follows: “[The] campaign is for Old Spice Body Wash overall, not specific to just Red Zone After Hours which just happens to be the body wash bottle used in the TV spots….Since the Smell Like A Man, Man campaign broke in February, Old Spice has month over month strengthened its market position and is now the number one brand of body wash and anti-perspirant/deodorant in both sales and volume with growth in the high single/double digits.”

Where did these false campaign results originate? In the old world of journalism, heads would roll if facts weren’t properly researched and double checked. We need look no further than Dan Rather’s firing for going to air with a report about President Bush’s military service without properly vetting his facts.

In a social media driven environment the media is desperate to break a story first. No one wants to be the last one out the door with a story, and you are not only competing with other news outlets, you’re competing with 190,000,000 Twitter users. Given the fact that more and more people are looking at Twitter or Facebook for their news, are trusted journalists now compromising their own standards and integrity just to stay competitive? Would they rather publish a story with half the facts than risk being late to market?

The decline in standards of journalism is only magnified in social media, because not only do you have one or two sources publishing inaccurate information, but you also have millions of people taking it as their own and spreading it to the rest of the world.

By design, social media is about sharing. To be active in the community, you need to contribute. This leads to a lot of links and re-tweets of information that people happen across, and think may be relevant to their social media circle. We now rely on our peers as trusted news sources.

On a professional level, information sourcing is very apparent in the marketing industry. The pass-it-on approach is often used as a tool to promote one’s stature in the social media sphere. As most social media “feeds” quickly refresh, pushing posts down the pages faster than you can say “Facebook”, many individuals are going beyond sharing, and taking on the duty of Social Media Aggregator. These individuals are social media mavens that use a shock and awe approach to their sharing. These people literally spend hours a day sourcing the Web in search for breaking news, insightful articles, and obscure facts only to quickly re-post it themselves with a small bit of commentary so that they can leverage in on the story.

It’s basically digital Gonzo journalism. An amazing ad campaign could break in Brazil and five minutes later you’d have 20,000 people sharing the news link while offering their own two cents. Next thing you know those bloggers and tweeters are now being indexed in Google as references that are attached to the campaign, and their opinions become part of the conversation.

It’s unavoidable that brands are going to have their marketing messages regurgitated through the Web. There’s not much you can do if the media, or a blogger, wants to weigh in on your story, and you can rest assured that someone will screw up the details or portray their opinion as fact.

Your best defence in social media is a strong offence. You need to monitor and appropriately respond to brand chatter, and ensure that your message is accurate. The best way to stop false information from spreading is to do your own part and seed the truth. Social media is far less forgiving on the strong and silent types. If your brand is achieving any form of success, then you are likely being talked about online. Be sure to be the one to share your story clearly and utilize official channels of PR and corporate communications to reinforce your message.

Lastly, we might want to all take an extra few seconds and read all the facts before we post that next article on Twitter or Facebook. We may not be professional journalists, but we do have to take some responsibility for the information we share.

We could all benefit from taking the ethics code of the Society of Professional Journalists into account before we post information:

• Seek Truth and Report It
• Minimize Harm
• Act Independently
• Be Accountable

An email address may be all you need to start identifying who your customers really are. You wouldn’t think an email address would tell you much about them, other than whether they like Hotmail or GMail, or whether they haven’t changed it since high school. However, your customer’s email address is really a great gateway to learning more about them.

Using their email, you can send them surveys. You can ask them to update their personal information on your website. Or, you can even Google their email and aggregate the information you find.

But now, thanks to Flowtown, there is another method to enhance your customer dataset.

By entering one of your customer’s emails into Flowtown, it instantly searches the web to determine their name, sex, occupation, age bracket, location, and social networks they belong to. So, all of the sudden, rockstar101@hotmail.com actually means something!

One downside I can think of is Flowtown only seems to provide information for individuals who have their email addresses associated with social networks/online profiles. So you are unlikely to find information pertaining to every single email on your database. However, as people become more liberal in their use of social media and giving of their personal information, I’m sure you’ll find information pertaining to a good percentage of it.

For many businesses, what Flowtown provides is all you may need before starting to segment your database.

So try it—run Flowtown on your database. And then the next time you think about sending your customers a survey, or building an exhausting form on your website to collect their name, age, and occupation—try to keep things a little simpler. Just ask for their email, and that should be a pretty good place to start.

Enter Microsite 2.0: the Facebook Fan Page!

Brands are charging towards the platform that is irresistible with its many hundreds of millions of potential customers just waiting to be with you. Unlike those microsite islands, Facebook is in the middle of the party, and provides huge advantages for brand participation:

• Engagement and “radiused exposure” of brand messaging through the power of the Wall Post
• Automatic reach through its easy external push/pull of RSS, SMS, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr
• Developer control through FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that provides surprising openness to the look and feel of the Fan Page, and hooks into a Facebook user’s profile, and feed data
• Built-in Analytics that break down the walls of anonymity with access to fan data including demographics, habits, and contacts

Ironically, along with all the new faculties and connected potential of the Facebook Fan Page, comes the old challenge of how to create a truly engaging brand experience. The toy maker Hasbro has launched a large-scale broadcast campaign driving people to Facebook.com/cranium, but the experience rings hollow with what might be staged videos and Tweets. What looks easy, usually never is. Goodbye sweet microsite; hello, same, old, marketing challenge.

If you’d like to talk about how to bring your brand experience to Facebook in a valuable way for your customers, drop us a line.

With the goal of simplifying Google’s standard search advertising model, Google announced that they would begin testing a new fixed pricing system, which is a model much more familiar to local businesses.

Essentially, whether you’re a hair salon, car dealership, or restaurant – for a fixed monthly fee, you will be able to place an ad with Google, much like how you would in the Yellow Pages. This is a huge opportunity for any business that isn’t familiar with Google’s current advertising model, which involves bidding for keywords (something that can be quite a complex process).

Along with this new pricing system, Google Voice will allow ads to feature a unique phone number that can be associated with your business. So when a customer see’s your ad and calls you using the unique number provided by Google, you will receive a “This call brought to you by Google” notification, allowing you to track and measure the success of your ads. With Google’s newly simplified system, any local business with limited online advertising knowledge will be able to run fully measurable targeted ads quickly and easily. And if customers are sent directly to your business phone number, your business may not even require a website to advertise with Google.

However, a nice website is still strongly recommended.

Hey Everybody – we just released this press release in anticipation of a unique street team campaign we are executing tomorrow. Read below for the details!

Hot Tomali’s Action-Packed Marketing Campaign for Resume Hut Recruits Super Job Candidates

If you’re walking around Vancouver and notice some real-life packaged action figures, blame Hot Tomali Communications (www.hottomali.com), an integrated marketing agency located in Vancouver, B.C. The action-packed professionals are part of a new campaign titled “Job Candidate 2.0″, which promotes the launch of Resume Hut (www.resume-hut.com) who has expanded to Vancouver after operating for 23 years in Victoria. The expansion is part of a larger strategy in which Resume Hut aims to expand across North America over the next five years.

The unique idea for the campaign came as a result of a combination of factors. “When we were approached with the idea of executing a campaign for Resume Hut, we needed to come up with something that was engaging, memorable, and cost-effective,” says Clayton Mitchell, Hot Tomali’s Strategic Planner. “Working with Resume Hut, we started with a complete rebranding including a new logo and the positioning line ‘Position Yourself’. The key insight we extracted during our creative process was that Resume Hut helps you position yourself more effectively for the jobs you want—in a sense, repackaging you.”

Hot Tomali had to contend with the fact that there are many online services that claim to be able to do the same thing that Resume Hut does, but they’re actually quite different. Resume Hut also specializes in services such as interview skills training, job hunting, career coaching, and conflict resolution.

“Not only is the action figure concept applicable to a street team execution, it can also be applied to multiple media channels. We developed a campaign platform that can easily be leveraged in a bus shelter, television ad, and a variety of other media, making it ideal when Resume Hut expands across North America,” says Patrick Chambers, Art Director at Hot Tomali.

The campaign was launched in mid-March and is being strategically placed around Vancouver. The next street team is scheduled to promote Resume Hut at Vancouver’s Career Fair on March 31. Teams will be stationed outside of the Vancouver Convention Centre, between Howe and Burrard on Cordova Street.

View Campaign Photos on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/hottomali

I tend to take this poll with a grain of salt. It seems as if the focus groups studying the spots are more influenced by the name brands of the ads they watch than the ads themselves. A-B’s Clydesdale ads coming in at number 2 and 3, despite a lack of decent humor or a key insight seems to support this.

In spite of reported record sales, the advertising crop in this year’s Superbowl commercials just seemed thinner, and watered down. Perhaps the money got slashed from creative for the sake of the media budget? Or are we all being just a little bit more cautious with this recession hangover?

None of this year’s ads jumped out and said “that’ll win at Cannes” and considering this is the industry’s biggest stage, it’s a huge disappointment.

There were a few spots that I thought were worth noting:

“Pedigree – Crazy Pet”
Mayhem ensues when people adopt crazy pets like a rhino and a warthog. The messaging was simple, “adopt a dog”, and the visual effects were outstanding. If they could have somehow worked booze or a shot to the crotch into this, it would’ve stood a chance. It’s actually great to see an ad for a dog food company that doesn’t feature a fuzzy little puppy.

“Monster.com – Double Take”
Great spot. Loved the juxtaposition of the big boss and the lowly employee. Unfortunately, all of the career oriented websites seem to keep focusing on dissatisfaction with your current job as a key insight. I’d love to see someone blow this category open with something more positive.

“Denny’s – Serious”
This spot had great acting and a funny twist, although the Sopranos/Goodfellas thing is nothing new.

“Miller High Life – 1 Second Ads”
This one would get my vote for innovative use of media. In order to fight the other big budget brewers Miller High Life created a series of 1 seconds ads (yes one second each) to promote their product. I loved watching these, but not on TV. I think the real value of this campaign is in the viral and online space. By doing something totally different Miller created a PR buzz and people can definitely appreciate the 1 second ads more by going to the Miller website www.1secondad.com. It’s much easier to follow them online where you can watch the spots in order and repeat anything that you might have missed.

“E-Trade 401k”
The talking baby is back. There’s nothing new with this campaign which has formerly won at a bunch of international award shows, and I think they’ve lost the key insight that was in place when they originally used these concepts: “investing online was so easy that even a baby could do it”. Now this campaign has simply resorted to the cuteness factor of the baby.

“GoDaddy – Dana Patrick Shower”
This in-house created ad was perhaps the worst ad of the bunch. My biggest question is why would racing’s top female driver sell herself out for these pityful attempts at school boy humor? Sad.